Does OJ make things happen?
BBC Middle East editor sues Owen Jones for libel at High Court over Gaza article
An article by journalist Owen Jones about the BBC’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza has caused the corporation’s Middle East editor to receive death threats, documents in a High Court libel claim allege.
Raffi Berg, who joined the BBC in 2001 and has been Middle East editor for its news website for 12 years, is suing Jones over an article titled The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza published on the Drop Site website in December last year.
The claims in the article, which Berg denies, include that BBC staff told Jones that Berg “plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of ‘systematic Israeli propaganda’”.
I can’t help feeling just a little Schadenfreude at OJ’s being tripped up. He is such a smug dismisser of women, you know.
Mr Stables said that following the article’s publication, an online petition was launched calling on the BBC to suspend Berg, who was targeted by protesters at the corporation’s premises in January this year.
The barrister continued that the BBC had since put “workplace security measures” in place for Berg and that police were investigating death threats made towards him.
But of course post hoc is not propter hoc. It’s a fallacy to claim that chronology=causality. The fact that a petition was launched after OJ’s article was published doesn’t necessarily mean the latter triggered the former.
One to watch.
Somewhere, I suspect Hadley Freeman, Helen Joyce, Suzanne Moore and the rest of Ojo’s targets are breaking out the champagne.
Okay, so most of my exposure to the Beeb is second-hand, via segments aired on NPR. But I’ve never pegged any sort of bias in their Gaza coverage. Rather, they, like NPR generally, tend to do neutral stories on the main, with human-interest stories that tend to be more arguably biased (as they center a person involved in the conflict or the protests surrounding it), but from both sides, so it tends to be a wash.
Of course, knowing Jones, it’s probable than any article that isn’t calling for the immediate abolishment of Israeli statehood is a hit-piece against the Palestinians.